Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine
On the Imperium:
"The Imperium is one of many cathartic dark fantasy statements about the
hideousness of contemporary reality: it channels a conviction that our
world, this neoliberal and imperial capitalist dog's dinner, is not in
fact the height of progress, but fundamentally awful and only getting
worse."
On the appeal of the Space Marine fantasy:
'The appeal of the Space Marine fantasy is that it takes the alienation,
misogyny and misery of being "man-made" and flips it into a rigid
gasmask of pride and belonging, of indestructible and unquestioning
purpose. In return for all the mutilations it deals and expects, it
promises calm and some degree of togetherness - and this is why it
doesn't really operate, in the bulk of Warhammer 40,000 art I've
encountered, as parody or satire.'
On what Sontag says about fascism:
'It's dangerous, Sontag says, to reduce fascism to "brutishness and
terror". Fascism survives because it offers things to aspire to - in
Sontag's summary, "the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the
fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings
of community". These are relatively innocuous values and emotions that
may also appear in, say, rock music, in superhero stories, at wargaming
tournaments and sports events, and in earnest game developer paeans to
"absolute brotherhood and sacrifice".'
On masculinity :
"I'm not immune to this hellish daydream. It's a carnival mirrorshow for
all the tackly little aggressions and humiliations of my own upbringing.
I understand my own masculinity as a wound that is slowly healing, and
which is reopened periodically by the experience of art that cultivates
the old patriarchal frenzy. I find Warhammer 40,000's Imperium freeing,
as a magnification of the grinding stupidity of patriarchy, but I also
feel the pull of these warty stereotypes. I look at the thunderously
daft trailer for Relic's Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War 3 and, silly as
it sounds, I tear up a little, because I see in the smiling face of the
doomed Marine the sheer absence of fear my older male conditioning has
always demanded, and never permitted..."
